I love Marina Hyde 😊
I love Marina Hyde 😊
I like Christopher Snowdon.
People aged over 90 were at 4,300 times greater risk of catching and dying from Covid-19 between 7 March and 26 June than people aged 15-24. Even so, only two per cent of them did.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-risk-of-...59jjyH2mJEfqSI
Richard Taylor
"William Tell could take an apple off your head. Taylor could take out a processed pea."
Sid Waddell
Marina Hyde wins:
Alas, these are overly testing times for this prime minister, who we already know is too afraid to do the job without his emotional support psycho, Dominic Cummings
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...minster-thames
Marina Hyde FTW
Boris Johnson looks quite like a man who has put his head through a hole at a fairground and ended up wearing a wooden suit
....it's all downhill from here.
Christopher Snowdon
Back in March, the idea circulated of “cocooning” the old and vulnerable for twelve weeks and letting the rest of society go about its business. The government rejected it because it was perceived to be unfair on those who were locked up. Instead, it decided that it would be fairer to lock everybody up (thereby providing a little lesson in how equality of outcome works in practice).
Richard Taylor
"William Tell could take an apple off your head. Taylor could take out a processed pea."
Sid Waddell
More or Less prog
Case "doubling" from the press conference: "at the moment we think the epidemic is doubling roughly every seven days. It could be a little bit longer, may be a little bit shorter, but let's say every seven days. If, and that's quite a big if, that continues unabated and this grows doubling every seven days....by mid October you'd end up with something like 50,000 cases...per day".
Commentary says that case count is a "hot mess" at the moment. But that things are getting worse, even though hospitalisations are low. Admissions were, however, doubling every eight days with "significant regional variation", the NW being hit particularly badly. Deaths are going up, but numbers are still low, at around 15/day.
According to the ONS, infections are going up but not doubling every seven days. Possibly around 7-20 days.
On false positives, Prof Spiegelhalter suggests term is being misused and misinterpreted. The chances of a test showing that someone who doesn't have an infection as positive is <1%. Probably around 0.8% Testing a group of people is different and depends on how common the virus is amongst the group. Spiegelhalter uses the 1 person in 1000 example, which would return 9 positives. But goes on to say that this only occurs if the sample is random. In Pillar 2 testing, the sample is not random and the current positivity rate is 4.5%, suggesting that rather than 1/1000 having the virus, the level may be more like 40 to 50/1000. Spiegelhalter says: "In this case, even with a false positive rate of around 0.8%, most of the positive cases will be true positives". Also goes on to say that 0.8% false positives seems far too high and ONS data suggests something like 0.04 or 0.02% false positive rate.
Spiegelhalter calls the false positive issue a "distraction" and a "complete red herring".
....it's all downhill from here.
Yeah I think the doubling thing, like the old rice on a chessboard parable, was just said to jolt the general public into taking things much more seriously to be honest.
The trouble is, if the real figures now turn out in a few weeks time to be stupendously lower that ‘illustrated’, will they be able to sell that as their early warning having the desired effect or will they just be laughed off the stage for scare-mongering?